majdanek worldwarii july-aug2013

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Soviet soldiers of the Third Belorussian Army could

be forgiven for thinking at first glance that what they

had just come across in the Polish city of Lublin was a

POW camp, given the rows of barracks that stretched

off into the distance. But even before entering the

site, everyone could see the chimney towering over

the facility. Chimneys standing in burned cities after

a Luftwaffe firebombing had become a common sight for soldiers on

the Eastern Front. But there was no evidence that Lublin had been

firebombed. This was more industrial smokestack than chimney,

suggesting that what they were approaching was a factory with hous-

ing for slave laborers.

Then, as the soldiers entered the camp,they saw rows of ovens with

piles of bones and other human remains spilling out, and it began to

dawn on them just what they had liberated: a “death factory,” with all

of the grim oxymoron that the name implies. It was the Allied world’s

first glimpse of the Nazis’ industrialized killing operation—so horrific

that it surpassed everything the Red Army had seen before, and so

obscene that the western powers dismissed it as a Soviet ploy.

BEFORE THE DISCOVERY OF THE CAMP at Lublin, called

Majdanek by locals, the mass murder of civilians was already too

familiar in the Soviet Union. During the war’s first six months itbecame routine forSoviet photojournalists to document the aftermath

of mass hangings in town squares and the burning of entire villages.

In January 1942, Soviet troops liberated the Ukrainian city of

Kerch and found something unprecedented: the bodies of 7,000 Jews

and others piled in an antitank trench. As photographer Dmitrii Baltermants recounted years later, “The clothing on the corpses

suggested that they were civilians brought out to this field and shot en masse.”It was the first of what would become mind-numb-

ingly repetitive scenes of mass murder. Soviet photographers, who had been assigned from the first days of the war to record acts

of heroism and fortitude against “the fascist beast,” now added to their mandate the documentation of enemy atrocities.

The Soviet media splashed the photographs on the pages of the daily paper, in magazines, and even on broadsides posted

Soviet soldiers found the

of Germany’s murder machine.Nobody believed them

RIA NOVOSTI; OPPOSITE: CENTRAL STATE ARCHIVE FOR PHOTOS & FILMS, KIEV

W O R L D W A R I I I I52

By David Shneer

FIRST PROOF

German POWs display cans of Zyklon B for their Soviet

captors. This photograph by Boris Tseitlin was one of

the first to document the pesticide’s use in genocide.


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Soviet officials examine a warehouse overflowing with shoes taken from prisoners killed at Majdanek and other extermination

sites in eastern Poland. At least 80,000 people died at the camp; 480 others, mostly POWs, were liberated by the Red Army.

throughout the nation for every passerby to see. A typical head-

line in Ogonyok, comparable to Life magazine, admonished

readers to “Take Revenge,” with large sans-serif letters looming

over an image of a smoldering pile of human remains.

Yet even after reading about these staggering German crimes

for two and a half years, the Soviet people—and their western

allies—were not prepared for Majdanek.

AFTER SOVIET TROOPSLIBERATED LUBLINON July 24,

1944, it took researchers and journalists nearly three weeks to

make sense of what had occurred at the camp.

Constructed as a prisoner of war camp in 1941, Majdanek

eventually became part of the network of Nazi extermination

camps, all six of which were in German-occupied Poland. In thewinter of 1941–42, camp authorities began using Zyklon B gas in

a makeshift chamber to murder prisoners deemed too weak to

work. The camp continued to house POWs,but once permanent

gas chambers and crematoria were built, from October 1942 to

the end of 1943 Jews were deported en masse to Majdanek and

gassed. On November 3, 1943, special SS and police units shot

18,000 Jews just outside the camp in Operation Harvest Festival,

the Holocaust’s largest single-day, single-site massacre. The

bodies were buried or cremated inside Majdanek.After that, Jews

were no longer the majority of those imprisoned or killed there,

although the gas chambers continued to operate until early July

1944, shortly before the arrival of Soviet troops.Soviet investiga-

tors estimated that 400,000 Jews and 1.5 million others were

killed at Majdanek. (Recent research confirmed 59,000 Jews and

20,000 others were killed, though the records are incomplete and

it’s likely more were killed or died from harsh conditions.)

When Majdanek was liberated the concept of a facility

designed for industrial murder using a cyanide-based pesticide

was completely foreign, so Soviet journalists reported exten-

sively on everything that made Majdanek horrifyingly unique.

The first photos and news reports, written by Konstantin

Simonov, were published on August 10 by Red Star , the army

newspaper. Two days later the daily state paper Izvestiia brokethe story to the public. On the front page, among photos of

human remains, it ran a shot of canisters imprinted with the

German words Giftgas (“poison gas”) and Zyklon. While read-

ers were familiar with poison gas on the battlefield, they would

need to turn to Evgenii Kriger’s accompanying article to learn

that at Majdanek the SS had deployed it in “extermination

chambers” that were operated like slaughterhouses. As Kriger

entered a gas chamber, which the Germans had disguised as a

shower, he noted “the graffiti scrawled on the walls and the


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W O R L D W A R I I54

random drawings that were the last traces of lives extinguished.”

On August 11 the Soviet filmmaker and occasional journal-

ist Roman Karmen filed a story on the camp, translated as

Maidan in the English version sent over the wire that appeared

a few days later in the Daily Worker , the newspaper of America’s

Communist Party USA. “In the course of all my travels into lib-

erated territory,” Karmen wrote, “I have never seen a more

abominable sight than‘Maidan’near Lublin, Hitler’s notoriousVernichtungslager —extermination camp—where more than

half a million European men, women, and children were mas-

sacred.” Karmen recalled the notorious Babi Yar, a ravine in

Kiev where more than 100,000 people, mostly Jews, were shot

in September 1941, and dismissed it as “a country cemetery”

compared to Majdanek.

Karmen’s description must have been particularly chilling to

American Daily Worker readers. Under the subheading “Huge

Crematorium,” Karmen explained the killing process with details

based on three weeks of research at Majdanek: “Groups of 100

people would be brought here to be burned almost alive. They

already had been stripped and then chlorinated in special gaschambers adjoining. The gas chambers contained some 250 per-

sons at one time. They were closely packed in a standing posi-

tion so that after they suffocated from the chlorine, they still

remained standing. Executioners then would enter, remove the

suffocated victims, some of whom still stirred feebly and place

the bodies in special carts. The carts were dumped into a roar-

ing furnace heated to 1,500 degrees centigrade.The whole thing

was organized with diabolical efficiency.” He closed by telling

readers both in the Soviet Union and the United States,“It is dif-

ficult to believe it myself but my eyes cannot deceive me.”

Majdanek also revealed another grim facet of the Nazi death

camp system: processing victims’ belongings. The camp served

as the central storage facility for clothing and shoes from

the other eastern extermination centers, at Belzec, Sobibor,

and Treblinka. A ramshackle warehouse overflowing with a

mountain of footwear became the most important image of

Majdanek—representing the absence of thousands of people

who once stood in thousands of pairs of shoes. At the time it

was the most awful symbol of mass murder imaginable.

Soon after the camp’s liberation the Soviet army began taking

German POWs to Majdanek to face their country’s war crimes.

As Simonov wrote in his memoirs, “A few thousand German

frontline soldiers, taken as prisoners in battle near Lublin, wereled through every inch of Majdanek on orders of the Soviet

military leadership. There was a singular goal—to give the

POWs the opportunity to be convinced of what the SS had

done. I saw with my own eyes that even they could not have

imagined what was possible.”

REPORTSOFADEATHCAMP INLUBLIN cropped up spo-

radically in the western media shortly after the Soviet press

broke the news. But the photographs languished while editors

and government officials stared dumbly, unsure of what to do

with the shocking material. Western officials and media often

dismissed Soviet press reports about German atrocities as prop-

aganda, and many newspaper editors found the descriptions of

Majdanek too monstrous to believe.

On August 13, 1944, the Los Angeles Times reprinted

Karmen’s article, but with a disclaimer: “The only war corre-

spondents permitted to accompany the Russian armies except


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Majdanek’s administrators fled without

destroying the last traces of past massacres.

Photos of camp ovens, like this one by

Mikhail Trakhman, supplanted previous

icons of German brutality.

of Jewsat the“dead center of Europe’s horror.”

It was not until late August that Sovietoccupation forces opened the camp to

Lublin’s residents and western journalists. If

Soviet photographs were not convincing,

perhaps eyewitness accounts would be.

Photographs of Lublin residents visiting

Majdanek show them in mourning, dressed in

their Sunday best. Perhaps they were search-

ing forrelatives or grieving other losses. Maybe

they came to see what had taken place in their

backyard, since Majdanek wasright at theedge

of the city. In either case, Soviet authorities

wanted to make sure Poles saw Majdanekas their victimization at the hands of the

Germans. They hoped the local population

would forget—or at least credit the Germans

for—atrocities like the murder of thousands

of Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn,

and see the Red Army’s return to Poland as

liberation rather than re-occupation.

Local Poles, as well as former prisoners

who remained there, also participated in a

larger drama as they confronted German

POWs. Alexander Werth, a Moscow-based

BBC correspondent, reported one such

encounter: “A crowd of German prisoners

had been taken through the camp. Around

stood crowds of Polish women and children,

and they screamed at the Germans, and there

was a half-insane old Jew who bellowed

frantically in a husky voice: ‘Kindermörder,

Kindermörder! ’ And the Germans went

through the camp, at first at an ordinary

pace, and then faster and faster, till they ran

in a frantic panicky stampede, and they were

green with terror, and their hands shook andtheir teeth chattered.” Mikhail Trakhman’s

photos depicted the Poles more ambiguously:

yes, as angry mourners,but also as bystanders

who simply watch the passing Germans

as they might have watched the smoke rise

from Majdanek.

Western journalists struggled to convince

readers—and their editors—that the initial

accounts were true, verified by firsthand


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Lublin residents pay their respects to the dead. Majdanek was the only suburban extermination facility, yet even eyewitnesses to

its gruesome operations could not convince the United States and Great Britain of Germany’s industrialized system for murder.

J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 13

reporting. The first major story published in America, by New

York Times correspondent William Lawrence, began,“I have just

seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth.” But doubt

remained. The British media would not publish the account by

the BBC’s Werth. As he explains in his memoir, when he sent a

detailed report on Majdanek to his editors they “refused to use

it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt.”

SOVIET TROOPS CONTINUED TOPUSHAxis forces west-

ward. Budapest and Warsaw were liberated in late January 1945,

Vienna in April, and, after a searing battle that killed upwards

of 350,000 people, Berlin fell in early May. By that point Soviet

troops had reached the sites of all six extermination camps.The

swift Soviet advance in July 1944 had prompted Majdanek’sadministration to flee before destroying evidence of its func-

tion, but the other camps liberated that July—Belzec, Sobibor,

and Treblinka—had long since fulfilled their grim purpose and

been razed to leave little trace of what occurred there. On

January 20, 1945, the Red Army reached a fifth camp, Chelmno,

which had also been dismantled. The only other extermination

facilities found intact were at Auschwitz.

Auschwitz had something Majdanek mostly lacked: sur-

vivors. Where Majdanek had a few hundred, Auschwitz had

thousands. Prisoners deemed fit for labor were moved out

ahead of the Red Army on death marches to other concentra-

tion camps—Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, or Bergen Belsen. At

Auschwitz’s liberation on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops also

found an infirmary full of patients. Through their voices,

Auschwitz—not Majdanek—eventually became synonymous

with the fate of Jews and other undesirables under the Nazi

regime. The anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation is now

International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Yet the liberation of Auschwitz did not fully persuade west-

erners that Germany had built and operated facilities explicitly

for industrial-scale murder. As Werth had experienced with his

BBC editors, “It was not until the discovery in the west of

Buchenwald,Dachau, and Belsen that they were convinced thatMajdanek and Auschwitz were also genuine.”

Soviet journalists had no reason to question the evidence

discovered at Majdanek, but belief didn’t come easily. Boris

Tseitlin, who had photographed the mass grave at Kerch,

described coming to Majdanek: “In front of us lay a field of

cabbage, rich and luxuriant. What could be more innocent? No

one could imagine that the cabbage abundantly growing on

dozens of surrounding acres was nourished with the blood and

ashes of the tortured and dead.” ✯

RIA NOVOSTI/ALAMY (ALL)

majdanek worldwarii july-aug2013

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